In a field of medicine, pathology, or the like, there has been proposed a system that digitizes an image of a cell, a tissue, an organ, or the like of a living body, that is obtained by an optical microscope, to examine the tissue or the like by a doctor or a pathologist or diagnose a patient based on the digitized image.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-37250 (hereinafter, referred to as Patent Document 1) discloses a method in which an image optically obtained by a microscope is digitized by a video camera with a CCD (charge coupled device), a digital signal is input to a control computer system, and the image is visualized on a monitor. A pathologist performs examination while watching the image displayed on the monitor (see, for example, paragraphs [0027] and [0028] and FIG. 5 of Patent Document 1).
In such systems, an image displayed on a monitor can be changed in accordance with an instruction of an operation made by a user using an input means such as a mouse. The “change” refers to, for example, movement, rotation, zoom-in, and zoom-out of a display range of the image. By those operations, the user can operate the image as if the user actually operated a microscope. Such systems include one in which two images are displayed in parallel with each other on one screen to be compared with each other by the user. The system changes an image to which an instruction is input in accordance with an instruction of an operation made by a user with respect to any one of the images. Here, in the case where the user wishes to apply the same change to the two images, the user needs to make an instruction of the same operation with respect to the respective images, which requires complicated operations.
In view of the circumstances as described above, there is a need for an information processing apparatus, a method, and a computer-readable medium which are capable of efficiently comparing two images by a user.